Dark Web's Doppelgängers Aim to Dupe Antifraud Systems

Deep within the encrypted bowels of the dark Web, beyond the reach of regular search engines, hackers and cybercriminals are brazenly trading a new breed of digital fakes. Yet unlike AI-generated deepfake audio and video--which embarrass the likes of politicians and celebrities by making them appear to say or do things they never would--this new breed of imitators is aimed squarely at relieving us of our hard-earned cash. Comprising highly detailed fake user profiles known as digital doppelgängers, these entities convincingly mimic numerous facets of our digital device IDs, alongside many of our tell-tale online behaviors when conducting transactions and e-shopping. The result: credit card fraudsters can use these doppelgängers to attempt to evade the machine-learning-based anomaly-detecting antifraud measures upon which banks and payments service providers have come to rely. It is proving to be big criminal business: many tens of thousands of doppelgängers are now being sold on the dark Web.